Space for Notes

Women and the Subversion of the Community
Mariarosa Dalla Costa
(1971)
These observations are an attempt to define and analyze the “Woman
Question”, and to locate this question in the entire “female role” as it has been
created by the capitalist division of labour.
We place foremost in these pages the housewife as the central figure in this
female role. We assume that all women are housewives and even those who
work outside the home continue to be housewives. That is, on a world level, it
is precisely what is particular to domestic work, not only measured as number
of hours and nature of work, but as quality of life and quality of relationships
which it generates, that determines a woman’s place wherever she is and to
whichever class she belongs. We concentrate here on the position of the
working-class woman, but this is not to imply that only working-class women
are exploited. Rather it is to confirm that the role of the working-class
housewife, which we believe has been indispensable to capitalist production is
the determinant for the position of all other women. Every analysis of women
as a caste, then, must proceed from the analysis of the position of
working-class housewives.
In order to see the housewife as central, it was first of all necessary to analyze
briefly how capitalism has created the modern family and the housewife’s role
in it, by destroying the types of family group or community which previously
existed. This process is by no means complete. While we are speaking of the
Western world and Italy in particular, we wish to make clear that to the extent
that the capitalist mode of production also brings the Third World under its
command, the same process of destruction must be and is taking place there.
Nor should we take for granted that the family as we know it today in the most
technically advanced Western countries is the final form the family can assume
under capitalism. But the analysis of new tendencies can only be the product of
an analysis of how capitalism created this family and what woman’s role is
today, each as a moment in a process.
We propose to complete these observations on the female role by analyzing as
well the position of the woman who works outside the home, but this is for a
later date. We wish merely to indicated here the link between two apparently
separate experiences: that of housewife and that of working woman.
The day-to-day struggles that women have developed since the Second World
War run directly against the organization of the factory and of the home. The
“unreliability” of women in the home and out of it has grown rapidly since
then, and runs directly against the factory as regimentation organized in time
and space, and against the social factory as organization of the reproduction of
labor power. This trend to more absenteeism, to less respect for timetables, to
higher job mobility, is shared by young men and women workers. But where
the man for crucial periods of his youth will be the sole support of a new
family, women who on the whole are not restrained in this way and who must
always consider the job at home, are bound to be even more disengaged from
work discipline, forcing disruption of the productive flow and therefore higher
costs to capital. (This is one excuse for the discriminatory wages which many
Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
times over make up for capital’s loss.) It is this same trend of disengagement
that groups of housewives express when they leave their children with their
husbands at work.* This trend is and will increasingly be one of the decisive
forms of the crisis in the systems of the factory and of the social factory.
[* This happened as part of the massive demonstration of women celebrating
International Women’s Day in the US, August 1970.]
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In recent years, especially in the advanced capitalist countries, there have
developed a number of women’s movements of different orientations and
range, from those which believe the fundamental conflict in society is between
men and women to those focusing on the position of women as a specific
manifestation of class exploitation.
If at first sight the position and attitudes of the former are perplexing,
especially to women who have had previous experience of militant
participation in political struggles, it is, we think, worth pointing out that
women for whom sexual exploitation is the basic social contradiction provide
an extremely important index of the degree of our own frustration, experienced
by millions of women both inside and outside the movement. There are those
who define their own lesbianism in these terms (we refer to views expressed by
a section of the movement in the US in particular): “Our associations with
women began when, because we were together, we could acknowledge that we
could no longer tolerate relationships with men, that we could not prevent these
from becoming power relationships in which we were inevitably subjected.
Our attentions and energies were diverted, our power was diffused and its
objectives delimited.” From this rejection has developed a movement of gay
women which asserts the possibilities of a relationship free of a sexual power
struggle, free of the biological social unit, and asserts at the same time our need
to open ourselves to a wider social and therefore sexual potential.
Now in order to understand the frustrations of women expressing themselves in
ever-increasing forms, we must be clear what in the nature of the family under
capitalism precipitates a crisis on this scale. The oppression of women, after
all, did not begin with capitalism. What began with capitalism was the more
intense exploitation of women as women and the possibility at last of their
liberation.
The origins of the capitalist family
In pre-capitalist patriarchal society the home and the family were central to
agricultural and artisan production. With the advent of capitalism the
socialization of production was organized with the factory as its centre. Those
who worked in the new productive centre, the factory, received a wage. Those
who were excluded did not. Women, children and the aged lost the relative
power that derived from the family’s dependence on their labour, which was
seen to be social and necessary. Capital, destroying the family and the
community and production as one whole, on the one hand has concentrated
basic social production in the factory and the office, and on the other has in
essence detached the man from the family and turned him into a wage labourer
It has put on the man’s shoulders the burden of financial responsibility for
women, children, the old and the ill, in a word, all those who do not receive
wages. From that moment began the expulsion from the home of all those who
did not procreate and service those who worked for wages. The first to be
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Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
excluded from the home, after men, were children; they sent children to school.
The family ceased to be not only the productive, but also the educational
centre.*
[*This is to assume a whole new meaning for “education”, and the work now being
done on the history of compulsory education - forced learning - proves this. In England
teachers were conceived of as “moral police” who could (1) condition children against
“crime” - curb working-class reappropriation in the community; (2) destroy “the mob”,
working-class organization based on a family which was still either a productive unit or
at least a viable organizational unit; (3) make habitual regular attendance and good
timekeeping so necessary to children’s later employment; and (4) stratify the class by
grading and selection. As with the family itself, the transition to this new form of social
control was not smooth and direct, and was the result of contradictory forces both
within the class and within capital, as with every phase of the history of capitalism.]
To the extent that men had been the despotic heads of the patriarchal family,
based on a strict division of labour, the experience of women, children and men
was a contradictory experience which we inherit. But in pre-capitalist society
the work of each member of the community of serfs was seen to be directed to
a purpose: either to the prosperity of the feudal lord or to our survival. To this
extent the whole community of serfs was compelled to be co-operative in a
unity of unfreedom that involved to the same degree women, children and men,
which capitalism had to break.* In this sense the unfree individual, the
democracy of unfreedom** entered into a crisis. The passage from serfdom to
free labour power separated the male from the female proletarian and both of
them from their children. The unfree patriarch was transformed into the “free”
wage earner, and upon the contradictory experience of the sexes and the
generations was built a more profound estrangement and therefore a more
subversive relation.
[* Wage labour is based on the subordination of all relationships to the wage relation.
The worker must enter as an “individual” into a contract with capital stripped of the
protection of kinships.
**Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State”, Writings of the Young
Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat,
N.Y., 1967, p. 176.]
We must stress that this separation of children from adults is essential to an
understanding of the full significance of the separation of women from men, to
grasp fully how the organization of the struggle on the part of the women’s
movement, even when it takes the form of a violent rejection of any possibility
of relations with men, can only aim to overcome the separation which is based
on the “freedom” of wage labour.
The class struggle in education
The analysis of the school which has emerged during recent years particularly
with the advent of the students’ movement-has clearly identified the school as
a centre of ideological discipline and of the shaping of the labour force and its
masters. What has perhaps never emerged, or at least not in its profundity, is
precisely what precedes all this; and that is the usual desperation of children on
their first day of nursery school, when they see themselves dumped into a-class
and their parents suddenly desert them. But it is precisely at this point that the
whole story of school begins.*
[*We are not dealing here with the narrowness of the nuclear family that prevents
children from having an easy transition to forming relations with other people; nor with
what follows from this, the argument of psychologists that proper conditioning would
have avoided such a crisis. We are dealing with the entire organization of the society, of
which family, school and factory are each one ghettoized compartment. So every kind
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Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
of passage from one to another of these compartments is a painful passage. The pain
cannot be eliminated by tinkering with the relations between one ghetto and another but
only by the destruction of every ghetto.]
Seen in this way, the elementary school children are not those appendages
who, merely by the demands “free lunches, free fares, free books”, learnt from
the older ones, can in some way be united with the students of the higher
schools.* In elementary school children, in those who are the sons and
daughters of workers, there is always an awareness that school is in some way
setting them against their parents and their peers, and consequently there is an
instinctive resistance to studying and to being “educated”. This is the resistance
for which Black children are confined to educationally subnormal schools in
Britain.** The European working-class child, like the Block working-class
child, sees in the teacher somebody who is teaching him or her something
against her mother and father, not as a defense of the child but as an attack on
the class. Capitalism is the first productive system where the children of the
exploited are disciplined and educated in institutions organized and controlled
by the ruling class.***
[* “Free fares, free lunches, free books” was one of the slogans of a section of the
Italian students’ movement which aimed to connect the struggle of younger students
with workers and university students.
**In Britain and the US the psychologists Eysenck and Jensen, who are convinced
“scientifically” that Blacks have a lower “intelligence” than whites, and the progressive
educators like Ivan Illich seem diametrically opposed. What they aim to achieve links
them. They are divided by method. In any case the psychologists are not more racist
than the rest, only more direct. “Intelligence” is the ability to assume your enemy’s case
as wisdom and to shape your own logic on the basis of this. Where the whole society
operates institutionally on the assumption of white racial superiority, these
psychologists propose more conscious and thorough “conditioning” so that children
who do not learn to read do not learn instead to make molotov cocktails. A sensible
view with which Illich, who is concerned with the “underachievement” of children (that
is, rejection by them of “intelligence”), can agree.
*** In spite of the fact that capital manages the schools, control is never given
once and for all. The working class continually and increasingly challenges the content
and refuses the costs of capitalist schooling. The response of the capitalist system is to
re-establish its own control, and this control tends to be more and more regimented on
factory-like lines.
The new policies on education which are being hammered out even as we write,
however, are more complex than this. We can only indicate here the impetus for these
new policies:
(a) Working-class youth rejects that education prepares them for anything but a
factory, even if they will wear white collars there and use typewriters and
drawing-boards instead of riveting machines.
(b) Middle-class youth rejects the role of mediator between the classes and the
repressed personality this mediating role demands.
(c) A new labour power more wage and status differentiated is called for. The
present egalitarian trend must be reversed.
(d) A new type of labour process may be created which will attempt to interest the
worker in “participating” instead of refusing the monotony and fragmentation of the
present assembly-line.
If the traditional “road to success” and even “success” itself are rejected by the
young, new goals will have to be found to which they can aspire, that is, for which they
will go to school and go to work. New “experiments” in “free” education, where the
children are encouraged to participate in planning their own education and there is
greater democracy between teacher and taught are springing up daily. It is an illusion to
believe that this is a defeat for capital any more than regimentation will be a victory.
For in the creation of a labour power more creatively manipulated, capital will not in
the process lose 0.1 per cent of profit. “As a matter of fact,” they are in effect saying,
“you can be far more efficient for us if you take your own road, so long as it is through
our territory.” In some parts of the factory and in the social factory, capital’s slogan will
increasingly be: “Liberty and fraternity to guarantee and even extend equality.”]
The final proof that this alien indoctrination which begins in nursery school is
based on the splitting of the family is that those working-class children who
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Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
arrive (those few who do arrive) at university are so brainwashed that they are
unable any longer to talk to their community.
Working-class children then are the first who instinctively rebel against
schools and the education provided in schools. But their parents carry them to
schools and confine them to schools because they are concerned that their
children should “have an education”, that is, be equipped to escape the
assembly line or the kitchen to which they, the parents, are confined. If a
working-class child shows particular aptitudes, the whole family immediately
concentrates on this child, gives him the best conditions, often sacrificing the
others, hoping and gambling that he will carry them all out of the working
class. This in effect becomes the way capital moves through the aspirations of
the parents to enlist their help in disciplining fresh labour power.
In Italy parents less and less succeed in sending their children to school.
Children’s resistance to school is always increasing even when this resistance
is not yet organized.
At the same time that the resistance of children grows to being educated in
schools, so does their refusal to accept the definition that capital has given of
their age. Children want everything they see; they do not yet understand that in
order to have things one must pay for them, and in order to pay for them one
must have a wage, and therefore one must also be an adult. No wonder it is not
easy to explain to children why they cannot have what television has told them
they cannot live without.
But something is happening among the new generation of children and youth
which is making it steadily more difficult to explain to them the arbitrary point
at which they reach adulthood. Rather the younger generation is demonstrating
their age to us: in the sixties six-year-olds have already come up against police
dogs in the South of the United States. Today we find the same phenomenon in
Southern Italy and Northern Ireland, where children have been as active in the
revolt as adults. When children (and women) are recognized as integral to
history, no doubt other examples will come to light of very young people’s
participation (and of women’s) in revolutionary struggles. What is new is the
autonomy of their participation in spite of and because of their exclusion from
direct production. In the factories youths refuse the leadership of older
workers, and in the revolts in the cities they are the diamond point. In the
metropolis generations of the nuclear family have produced youth and student
movements that have initiated the process of shaking the framework of
constituted power; in the Third World the unemployed youth is often in the
streets before the working class organized in trade unions.
It is worth recording what The Times of London (1 June 1971) reported
concerning a head-teachers’ meeting called because one of them was
admonished for hitting a pupil: “Disruptive and irresponsible elements lurk
around every corner with the seemingly planned intention of eroding all forces
of authority.” This “is a plot to destroy the values on which our civilization is
built and of which our schools are some of the finest bastions”.
The exploitation of the wageless
We wanted to make these few comments on the attitude of revolt that is
steadily spreading among children and youth, especially from the working
class and particularly Black people, because we believe this to be intimately
connected with the explosion of the women’s movement and something which
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the women’s movement itself must take into account. We are dealing here with
the revolt of those who have been excluded, who have been separated by the
system of production, and who express in action their need to destroy the
forces that stand in the way of their social existence, but who this time are
coming together as individuals.
Women and children have been excluded. The revolt of the one against
exploitation through exclusion is an index of the revolt of the other.
To the extent to which capital has recruited the man and turned him into a
wage labourer, it has created a fracture between him and all the other
proletarians without a wage who, not participating directly in social
production, were thus presumed incapable of being the subjects of social
revolt.
Since Marx, it has been clear that capital rules and develops through the wage,
that is, that the foundation of capitalist society was the wage labourer and his
or her direct exploitation. What has been neither clear nor assumed by the
organizations of the working-class movement is that precisely through the
wage has the exploitation of the non-wage labourer been organized. This exploitation has been even more effective because the lack of a wage hid it. That
is, the wage commanded a larger amount of labour than appeared in factory
bargaining. Where women are concerned, their labour appears to be a
personal service outside of capital. The woman seemed only to be suffering
from male chauvinism, being pushed around because capitalism meant general
“injustice” and “bad and unreasonable behaviour”, the few (men) who noticed
convinced us that this was “oppression” but not exploitation. But “oppression”
hid another and more pervasive aspect of capitalist society. Capital excluded
children from the home and sent them to school not only because they are in
the way of others’ more “productive” labour or only to indoctrinate them. The
rule of capital through the wage compels every able-bodied person to function,
under the law of division of labour, and to function in ways that are if not
immediately, then ultimately profitable to the expansion and extension of the
rule of capital. That, fundamentally, is the meaning of school. Where children
are concerned, their labour appears to be learning for their own benefit.
Proletarian children have been forced to undergo the same education in the
schools: this is capitalist leveling against the infinite possibilities of learning.
Woman on the other hand has been isolated in the home, forced to carry out
work that is considered unskilled, the work of giving birth to, raising,
disciplining, and servicing the worker for production. Her role in the cycle of
social production remained invisible because only the product of her labour,
the labourer, was visible there. She herself was thereby trapped within
pre-capitalist working conditions and never paid a wage.
And when we say “pre-capitalist working conditions” we do not refer only to
women who have to use brooms to sweep. Even the best equipped American
kitchens do not reflect the present level of technological development; at most
they reflect the technology of the nineteenth century. If you are not paid by the
hour, within certain limits, nobody cares how long it takes you to do your
work.
This is not only a quantitative but a qualitative difference from other work, and
it stems precisely from the kind of commodity that this work is destined to
produce. Within the capitalist system generally, the productivity of labour
doesn’t increase unless there is a confrontation between capital and class:
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Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
technological innovations and co-operation are at the same time moments of
attack for the working class and moments of capitalistic response. But if this is
true for the production of commodities generally, this has not been true for the
production of that special kind of commodity, labour power. If technological
innovation can lower the limit of necessary work, and if the working-class
struggle in industry can use that innovation for gaining free hours, the same
cannot be said of housework; to the extent that she must in isolation procreate,
raise and be responsible for children, a high mechanization of domestic chores
doesn’t free any time for the woman. She is always on duty, for the machine
doesn’t exist that makes and minds children.* A higher productivity of
domestic work through mechanization, then, can be related only to specific
services, for example, cooking, washing, cleaning. Her workday is unending
not because she has not machines, but because she is isolated.**
[*We are not at all ignoring the attempts at this moment to make test-tube babies. But
today such mechanisms belong completely to capitalist science and control. The use
would be completely against us and against the class. It is not in our interest to abdicate
procreation, to consign it to the hands of the enemy. It is in our interest to conquer the
freedom to procreate for which we will pay neither the price of the wage nor the price
of social exclusion.
** To the extent that not technological innovation but only “human care” can raise
children, the effective liberation from domestic work time, the qualitative change of
domestic work, can derive only from a movement of women, from a struggle of women:
the more the movement grows, the less men-and first of all political militants can count
on female baby minding. And at the same time the new social ambience that the
movement constructs offers to children social space, with both men and women, that
has nothing to do with the day care centers organized by the state. These are already
victories of struggle. Precisely because they are the results of a movement that is by its
nature a struggle, they do not aim to substitute any kind of co-operation for the struggle
itself.]
Confirming the myth of female incapacity
With the advent of the capitalist mode of production, then, women were
relegated to a condition of isolation, enclosed within the family cell, dependent
in every aspect on men. The new autonomy of the free wage slave was denied
her, and she remained in a pre-capitalist stage of personal dependence, but this
time more brutalized because in contrast to the large-scale highly socialized
production which now prevails. Woman’s apparent incapacity to do certain
things, to understand certain things, originated in her history, which is a history
very similar in certain respects to that of “backward” children in special ESN
classes. To the extent that women were cut off from direct socialized
production and isolated in the home, all possibilities of social life outside the
neighborhood were denied them, and hence they were deprived of social
knowledge and social education. When women are deprived of wide
experience of organizing and planning collectively industrial and other mass
struggles, they are denied a basic source of education, the experience of social
revolt. And this experience is primarily the experience of learning your own
capacities, that is, your power, and the capacities, the power, of your class.
Thus the isolation from which women have suffered has confirmed to society
and to themselves the myth of female incapacity.
It is this myth which has hidden, firstly, that to the degree that the working
class has been able to organize mass struggles in the community, rent strikes,
struggles against inflation generally, the basis has always been the unceasing
informal organization of women there; secondly, that in struggles in the cycle
of direct production women’s support and organization, formal and informal,
has been decisive. At critical moments this unceasing network of women
surfaces and develops through the talents, energies and strength of the
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Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
“incapable female.” But the myth does not die. Where women could together
with men claim the victory – to survive (during unemployment) or to survive
and win (during strikes) – the spoils of the victor belonged to the class “in
general”. Women rarely if ever got anything specifically for themselves; rarely
if ever did the struggle have as an objective in any way altering the power
structure of the home and its relation to the factory. Strike or unemployment, a
woman’s work is never done.
The capitalist function of the uterus
Never as with the advent of capitalism has the destruction of woman as a
person meant also the immediate diminution of her physical integrity.
Feminine and masculine sexuality had already before capitalism undergone a
series of regimes and forms of conditioning. But they had also undergone
efficient methods of birth control, which have unaccountably disappeared.
Capital established the family as the nuclear family and subordinated within it
the woman to the man, as the person who, not directly participating in social
production, does not present herself independently on the labour market. As it
cuts off all her possibilities of creativity and of the development of her working
activity, so it cuts off the expression of her sexual, psychological and
emotional autonomy.
We repeat: never had such a stunting of the physical integrity of woman taken
place, affecting everything from the brain to the uterus. Participating with
others in the production of a train, a car or an aeroplane is not the same thing as
using in isolation the same broom in the same few square feet of kitchen for
centuries.
This is not a call for equality of men and women in the construction of
airplanes, but it is merely to assume that the difference between the two
histories not only determines the differences in the actual forms of struggle but
brings also finally to light what has been invisible for so long: the different
forms women’s struggles have assumed in the past. In the same way as women
are robbed of the possibility of developing their creative capacity, they are
robbed of their sexual life which has been transformed into a function for
reproducing labour power: the same observations which we made on the
technological level of domestic services apply to birth control (and, by the
way, to the whole field of gynaecology), research into which until recently has
been continually neglected, while women have been forced to have children
and were forbidden the right to have abortions when, as was to be expected, the
most primitive techniques of birth control failed.
From this complete diminution of woman, capital constructed the female role,
and has made the man in the family the instrument of this reduction. The man
as wage worker and head of the family was the specific instrument of this
specific exploitation which is the exploitation of women.
The homosexuality of the division of labour
In this sense we can explain to what extent the degraded relationships between
men and women are determined by the fracturing that society has imposed
between man and woman, subordinating woman as object, the “complement”
to man. And in this sense we can see the validity of the explosion of tendencies
within the women’s movement in which women want to conduct the struggle
against men as such* and no longer wish to use their strength to sustain even
sexual relationships with them, since each of these relationships is always
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Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
frustrating. A power relation precludes any possibility of affection and
intimacy. Yet between men and women power as its right commands sexual
affection and intimacy. In this sense, the gay movement is the most massive
attempt to disengage sexuality and power.
[* It is impossible to say for how long these tendencies will continue to drive the
movement forward and when they will turn into their opposite.]
But homosexuality generally is at the same time rooted in the framework of
capitalist society itself: women at home and men in factories and offices,
separated one from the other for the whole day; or a typical factory of 1,000
women with 10 foremen; or a typing pool (of women, of course) which works
for 50 professional men. All these situations are already a homosexual
framework of living.
Capital, while it elevates heterosexuality to a religion, at the same time in
practice makes it impossible for men and women to be in touch with each
other, physically or emotionally-it undermines heterosexuality except as a
sexual, economic and social discipline.
We believe that this is a reality from which we must begin. The explosion of
the gay tendencies have been and are important for the movement precisely
because they pose the urgency to claim for itself the specificity of women’s
struggle and above all to clarify in all their depths all facets and connections of
the exploitation of women.
Surplus value and the social factory
At this point then we would like to begin to clear the ground of a certain point
of view which orthodox Marxism, especially in the ideology and practice of
so-called Marxist parties, has always taken for granted. And this is: when
women remain outside social production, that is, outside the socially organized
productive cycle, they are also outside social productivity. The role of women,
in other words, has always been seen as that of a psychologically subordinated
person who, except where she is marginally employed outside the home, is
outside production; essentially a supplier of a series of use values in the home.
This basically was the viewpoint of Marx who, observing what happened to
women working in the factories, concluded that it would have been better for
them to be at home, where resided a morally higher form of life. But the true
nature of the role of housewife never emerges clearly in Marx. Yet observers
have noted that Lancashire women, cotton workers for over a century, are more
sexually free and helped by men in domestic chores. On the other hand, in the
Yorkshire coal-mining districts where a low percentage of women worked
outside the home, women are more dominated by the figure of the husband.
Even those who have been able to define the exploitation of women in
socialized production could not then go on to understand the exploited position
of women in the home; men are too compromised in their relationship with
women. For that reason only women can define themselves and move on the
woman question.
We have to make clear that, within the wage, domestic work produces not
merely use values, but is essential to the production of surplus value.* This is
true of the entire female role as a personality which is subordinated at all
levels, physical, psychological and occupational, which has had and continues
to have a precise and vital place in the capitalist division of labour, in the
pursuit of productivity at the social level. Let us examine more specifically the
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Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
role of women as a source of social productivity, that is, of surplus value
making. Firstly within the family.
[*Some first readers in English have found that this definition of women’s work should
be precise. What we meant precisely is that housework as work is productive in the
Marxian sense, that is, is producing surplus value.
We speak immediately after about the productivity of the entire female role. To
make clearer the productivity of the woman both as related to her work and as related to
her entire role must wait for a later text on which we are now at work. In this the
woman’s place is explained in a more articulated way from the point of view of the
entire capitalistic circuit.]
A. The productivity of wage slavery based on unwaged slavery
It is often asserted that, within the definition of wage labour, women in
domestic labour are not productive. In fact precisely the opposite is true if one
thinks of the enormous quantity of social services which capitalist organization
transforms into privatized activity, putting them on the backs of housewives.
Domestic labour is not essentially “feminine work”; a woman doesn’t fulfill
herself more or get less exhausted than a man from washing and cleaning.
These are social services inasmuch as they serve the reproduction of labour
power. And capital, precisely by instituting its family structure, has “liberated”
the man from these functions so that he is completely “free” for direct
exploitation; so that he is free to “earn” enough for a woman to reproduce him
as labour power.* It has made men wage slaves, then, to the degree that it has
succeeded in allocating these services to women in the family, and by the same
process controlled the flow of women onto the labour market. In Italy women
are still necessary in the home and capital still needs this form of the family. At
the present level of development in Europe generally, in Italy in particular,
capital still prefers to import its labour power-in the form of millions of men
from underdeveloped areas-while at the same time consigning women to the
home.**
[* Labour power “is a strange commodity for this is not a thing. The ability to labour
resides only in a human being whose life is consumed in the process of producing . . .
To describe its basic production and reproduction is to describe women’s work.”
(From Selma James’ introduction)
** This, however, is being countered by an opposite tendency, to bring women into
industry in certain particular sectors. Differing needs of capital within the same
geographical sector have produced differing and even opposing propaganda and
policies. Where in the past family stability has been based on a relatively standardized
mythology (policy and propaganda being uniform and officially uncontested), today
various sectors of capital contradict each other and undermine the very definition of
family as a stable, unchanging, “natural” unit. The classic example of this is the variety
of views and financial policies on birth control. The British government has recently
doubled its allocation of funds for this purpose. We must examine to what extent this
policy is connected with a racist immigration policy, that is, manipulation of the sources
of mature labour power; and with the increasing erosion of the work ethic which results
in movements of the unemployed and unsupported mothers, that is, controlling births
which pollute the purity of capital with revolutionary children.]
And women are of service not only because they carry out domestic labour
without a wage and without going on strike, but also because they always
receive back into the home all those who are periodically expelled from their
jobs by economic crisis. The family, this maternal cradle always ready to help
and protect in time of need, has been in fact the best guarantee that the unemployed do not immediately become a horde of disruptive outsiders.
The organized parties of the working-class movement have been careful not to
raise the question of domestic work. Aside from the fact that they have always
treated women as a lower form of life, even in factories, to raise this question
10
Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
would be to challenge the whole basis of the trade unions as organizations that
deal (a) only with the factory; (b) only with a measured and “paid” work day;
(c) only with that side of wages which is given to us and not with the side of
wages which is taken back, that is, inflation. Women have always been forced
by the working-class parties to put off their liberation to some hypothetical
future, making it dependent on the gains that men, limited in the scope of their
struggles by these parties, win for “themselves”.
In reality, every phase of working-class struggle has fixed the subordination
and exploitation of women at a higher level. The proposal of pensions for
housewives* (and this makes us wonder why not a wage) serves only to show
the complete willingness of these parties further to institutionalize women as
housewives and men (and women) as wage slaves.
[*Which is the policy, among others, of the Communist Party in Italy who for some
years proposed a bill to the Italian parliament which would have given a pension to
women at home, both housewives and single women, when they reached 55 years of
age. This bill was never passed.]
Now it is clear that not one of us believes that emancipation, liberation, can be
achieved through work. Work is still work, whether inside or outside the home.
The independence of the wage earner means only being a “free individual” for
capital, no less for women than for men. Those who advocate that the
liberation of the working-class woman lies in her getting a job outside the
home are part of the problem, not the solution. Slavery to an assembly line is
not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink. To deny this is also to deny the
slavery of the assembly line itself, proving again that if you don’t know how
women are exploited, you can never really know how men are. But this
question is so crucial that we deal with it separately. What we wish to make
clear here is that by the non-payment of a wage when we are producing in a
world capitalistically organized, the figure of the boss is concealed behind that
of the husband. He appears to be the sole recipient of domestic services, and
this gives an ambiguous and slavelike character to housework. The husband
and children, through their loving involvement, their loving blackmail, become
the first foremen, the immediate controllers of this labour.
The husband tends to read the paper and wait for his dinner to be cooked and
served, even when his wife goes out to work as he does and comes home with
him. Clearly, the specific form of exploitation represented by domestic work
demands a corresponding, specific form of struggle, namely the women’s
struggle, within the family.
If we fail to grasp completely that precisely this family is the very pillar of the
capitalist organization of work, if we make the mistake of regarding it only as a
superstructure, dependent for change only on the stages of the struggle in the
factories, then we will be moving in a limping revolution that will always
perpetuate and aggravate a basic contradiction in the class struggle, and a
contradiction which is functional to capitalist development. We would, in other
words, be perpetuating the error of considering ourselves as producers of use
values only, of considering housewives external to the working class. As long
as housewives are considered external to the class, the class struggle at every
moment and any point is impeded, frustrated, and unable to find full scope for
its action. To elaborate this further is not our task here. To expose and
condemn domestic work as a masked form of productive labour, however,
raises a series of questions concerning both the aims and the forms of struggle
of women.
11
Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
Socializing the struggle of the isolated labourer
In fact, the demand that would follow, namely “pay us wages for housework”,
would run the risk of looking, in the light of the present relationship of forces
in Italy, as though we wanted further to entrench the condition of
institutionalized slavery which is produced with the condition of
housework-therefore such a demand could scarcely operate in practice as a
mobilizing goal.*
[*Today the demand of wages for housework is put forward increasingly and with less
opposition in the women’s movement in Italy and elsewhere. Since this document was
first drafted (June ‘71), the debate has become more profound and many uncertainties
that were due to the relative newness of the discussion have been dispelled. But above
all, the weight of the needs of proletarian women has not only radicalized the demands
of the movement. It has also given us greater strength and confidence to advance them.
A year ago, at the beginning of the movement in Italy, there were those who still
thought that the state could easily suffocate the female rebellion against housework by
“paying” it with a monthly allowance of £7-£8 as they had already done especially with
those “wretched of the earth” who were dependent on pensions.]
The question is, therefore, to develop forms of struggle which do not leave the
housewife peacefully at home, at most ready to take part in occasional
demonstrations through the streets, waiting for a wage that would never pay for
anything; rather we must discover forms of struggle which immediately break
the whole structure of domestic work, rejecting it absolutely, rejecting our role
as housewives and the home as the ghetto of our existence, since the problem is
not only to stop doing this work, but to smash the entire role of housewife. The
starting point is not how to do housework more efficiently, but how to find a
place as protagonist in the struggle: that is, not a higher productivity of
domestic labour but a higher subversiveness in the struggle.
To immediately overthrow the relation between time-given-to-housework and
time-not-given-to-housework: it is not necessary to spend time each day
ironing sheets and curtains, cleaning the floor until it sparkles or to dust every
day. And yet many women still do that. Obviously it is not because they are
stupid: once again we are reminded of the parallel we made earlier with the
ESN school. In reality, it is only in this work that they can realize an identity
precisely because, as we said before, capital has cut them off from the process
of socially organized production.
But it does not automatically follow that to be cut off from socialized
production is to be cut off from socialized struggle: struggle, however,
demands time away from housework, and at the same time it offers an
alternative identity to the woman who before found it only at the level of the
domestic ghetto. In the sociality of struggle women discover and exercise a
power that effectively gives them a new identity. The new identity is and can
only be a new degree of social power.
The possibility of social struggle arises out of the socially productive character
of women’s work in the home. It is not only or mainly the social services
provided in the home that make women’s role socially productive, even though
in fact at this moment these services are identified with women’s role. But
capital can technologically improve the conditions of this work. What capital
does not want to do for the time being, in Italy at least, is to destroy the
position of the housewife as the pivot of the nuclear family. For this reason
there is no point in our waiting for the automation of domestic work, because
this will never happen: the maintenance of the nuclear family is incompatible
12
Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
with ‘the automation of these services. To really automate them, capital would
have to destroy the family as we know it; that is, it would be driven to socialize
in order to automate fully.
But we know all too well what their socialization means: it is always at the
very least the opposite of the Paris Commune!
The new leap that capitalist reorganization could make and that we can already
smell in the U. S. and in the more advanced capitalist countries generally is to
destroy the pre-capitalist isolation of production in the home by constructing a
family which more nearly reflects capitalist equality and its domination
through co-operative labour; to transcend “the incompleteness of capitalist
development” in the home, with the pre-capitalist, unfree woman as its pivot,
and make the family more nearly reflect in its form its capitalist productive
function, the reproduction of labour power.
To return then to what we said above: women, housewives, identifying
themselves with the home, tend to a compulsive perfection in their work. We
all know the saying too well; you can always find work to do in a house.
They don’t see beyond their own four walls. The housewife’s situation as a
pre-capitalist mode of labour and consequently this “femininity” imposed upon
her, makes her see the world, the others and the entire organization of work as
a something which is obscure, essentially unknown and unknowable; not lived;
perceived only as a shadow behind the shoulders of the husband who goes out
each day and meets this something.
So when we say that women must overthrow the relation of
domestic-work-time to non-domestic-time and must begin to move out of the
home, we mean their point of departure must be precisely this willingness to
destroy the role of housewife, in order to begin to come together with other
women, not only as neighbours and friends but as workmates and
anti-workmates; thus breaking the tradition of privatized female, with all its
rivalry, and reconstructing a real solidarity among women: not solidarity for
defense but solidarity for attack, for the organization of the struggle.
A common solidarity against a common form of labour. In the same way,
women must stop meeting their husbands and children only as wife and
mother, that is, at mealtimes after they have come home from the outside
world.
Every place of struggle outside the home, precisely because every sphere of
capitalist organization presupposes the home, offers a chance for attack by
women; factory meetings, neighbourhood meetings, student assemblies, each
of them are legitimate places for women’s struggle, where women can
encounter and confront men-women versus men, if you like, but as individuals,
rather than mother-father, son-daughter, with all the possibilities this offers to
explode outside of the house the contradictions, the frustrations, that capital has
wanted to implode within the family
A new compass for class struggle
If women demand in workers' assemblies that the night-shift be abolished
because at night, besides sleeping, one wants to make love-and it's not the
same as making love during the day if the women work during the day-that
would be advancing their own independent interests as women against the
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Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
social organization of work, refusing to be unsatisfied mothers for their
husbands and children.
But in this new intervention and confrontation women are also expressing
that their interests as women are not, as they have been told, separate and alien
from the interests of the class. For too long political parties, especially of the
left, and trade unions have determined and confined the areas of working class
struggle. To make love and to refuse night work to make love, is the interest of
the class. To explore why it is women and not men who raise the question is to
shed new light on the whole history of the class.
To meet your sons and daughters at a student assembly is to discover them
as individuals who speak among other individuals; it is to present yourself to
them as an individual. Many women have had abortions and very many have
given birth. We can't see why they should not express their point of view as
women first, whether or not they are students, in an assembly of medical
students: (We do not give the medical faculty as an example by accident. In the
lecture hall and in the clinic, we can see once more the exploitation of the
working class not only when third class patients exclusively are made the
guinea pigs for research. Women especially are the prime objects of
experimentation and also of the sexual contempt, sadism, and professional
arrogance of doctors.)
To sum up: the most important thing becomes precisely this explosion of
the women's movement as an expression of the specificity of female interests
hitherto castrated from all its connections by the capitalist organization of the
family. This has to be waged in every quarter of this society, each of which is
founded precisely on the suppression of such interests, since the entire class
exploitation has been built upon the specific mediation of women's
exploitation.
And so as a women's movement we must pinpoint every single area in
which this exploitation is located, that is, we must regain the whole specificity
of the female interest in the course of waging the struggle.
Every opportunity is a good one: housewives of families threatened with
eviction can object that their housework has more than covered the rent of the
months they didn't pay. On the out-skirts of Milan, many families have already
taken up this form of struggle.
Electric appliances in the home are lovely things to have, but for the workers
who make them, to make many is to spend time and to exhaust yourself. That
every wage has to buy all of them is tough, and presumes that every wife must
run all these appliances alone; and this only means that she is frozen in the
home, but now on a more mechanized level. Lucky worker, lucky wife!
The question is not to have communal canteens. We must remember that
capital makes Fiat for the workers first, then their canteen.
For this reason to demand a communal canteen in the neighborhood without
integrating this demand into a practice of struggle against the organization of
labor, against labor time, risks giving the impetus for a new leap that, on the
community level, would regiment none other than women in some alluring
work so that we will then have the possibility at lunchtime of eating shit
collectively in the canteen.
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Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
We want them to know that this is not the canteen we want, nor do we want
play centers or nurseries of the same order.* We want canteens too, and
nurseries and washing machines and dishwashers, but we also want choices: to
eat in privacy with few people when we want, to have time to be with children,
to be with old people, with the sick, when and where we choose. To "have
time" means to work less. To have time to be with children, the old and the
sick does not mean running to pay a quick visit to the garages where you park
children or old people or invalids. It means that we, the first to be excluded, are
taking the initiative in this struggle so that all those other excluded people, the
children, the old and the ill, can re-appropriate the social wealth; to be
re-integrated with us and all of us with men, not as dependents but
autonomously, as we women want for ourselves; since their exclusion, like
ours, from the directly productive social process, from social existence, has
been created by capitalist organization.
[* There has been some confusion over what we have said about canteens. A similar
confusion expressed itself in the discussions in other countries as well as Italy about
wages for housework. As we explained earlier, housework is as institutionalized as
factory work and our ultimate goal is to destroy both institutions. But aside from which
demand we are speaking about, there is a misunderstanding of what a demand is. It is a
goal which is not only a thing but, like capital at any moment, essentially a stage of
antagonism of a social relation. Whether the canteen or the wages we win will be a
victory or a defeat depends on the force of our struggle. On that force depends whether
the goal is an occasion for capital to more rationally command our labor or an occasion
for us to weaken their hold on that command. What form the goal takes when we
achieve it, whether it is wages or canteens or free birth control, emerges and is in fact
created in the struggle, and registers the degree of power that we reached in that
struggle.]
The refusal of work
Hence we must refuse housework as women’s work, as work imposed upon us,
which we never invented, which has never been paid for, in which they have
forced us to cope with absurd hours, 12 and 13 a day, in order to force us to
stay at home.
We must get out of the house; we must reject the home, because we want to
unite with other women, to struggle against all situations which presume that
women will stay at home, to link ourselves to the struggles of all those who are
in ghettos, whether that ghetto is a nursery, a school, a hospital, an old-age
home, or a slum. To abandon the home is already a form of struggle, since the
social services we perform there would then cease to be carried out in those
conditions, and so all those who work out of the home would then demand that
the burden carried by us until now be thrown squarely where it belongs-on to
the shoulders of capital. This alteration in the terms of struggle will be all the
more violent the more the refusal of domestic labour on the part of women will
be violent, determined and on a mass scale.
The working-class family is the more difficult point to break because it is the
support of the worker, but as worker, and for that reason the support of capital.
On this family depends the support of the class, the survival of the class-but at
the woman’s expense against the class itself. The woman is the slave of a wage
slave, and her slavery ensures the slavery of her man. Like the trade union, the
family protects the worker, but also ensures that he and she will never be
anything but workers. And that is why the struggle of the woman of the
working class against the family is crucial.
To meet other women who work inside and outside their homes allows us to
15
Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
possess other chances of struggle. To the extent that our struggle is a struggle
against work, it is inscribed in the struggle which the working class wages
against capitalist work. But to the extent that the exploitation of women
through domestic work has had its own specific history, tied to the survival of
the nuclear family, the specific course of this struggle which must pass through
the destruction of the nuclear family as established by the capitalist social
order, adds a new dimension to the class struggle.
B. The productivity of passivity
However, the woman’s role in the family is not only that of hidden supplier of
social services who does not receive a wage. As we said at the beginning, to
imprison women in purely complementary functions and subordinate them to
men within the nuclear family has as its premise the stunting of their physical
integrity. In Italy, with the successful help of the Catholic Church which has
always defined her as an inferior being, a woman is compelled before marriage
into sexual abstinence and after marriage into a repressed sexuality destined
only to bear children, obliging her to bear children. It has created a female
image of “heroic mother and happy wife” whose sexual identity is pure
sublimation, whose function is essentially that of receptacle for other people’s
emotional expression, who is the cushion of the familial antagonism. What has
been defined, then, as female frigidity has to be redefined as an imposed
passive receptivity in the sexual function as well.
Now this passivity of the woman in the family is itself “productive”. First it
makes her the outlet for all the oppressions that men suffer in the world outside
the home and at the same time the object on whom the man can exercise a
hunger for power that the domination of the capitalist organization of work
implants. In this sense, the woman becomes productive for capitalist
organization; she acts as a safety valve for the social tensions caused by it.
Secondly, the woman becomes productive inasmuch as the complete denial of
her personal autonomy forces her to sublimate her frustration in a series of
continuous needs that are always centered in the home, a kind of consumption
which is the exact parallel of her compulsive perfectionism in her housework.
Clearly, it is not our job to tell women what they should have in their homes.
Nobody can define the needs of others. Our interest is to organize the struggle
through which this sublimation will be unnecessary.
Dead labour and the agony of sexuality
We use the word “sublimation” advisedly. The frustrations of monotonous and
trivial chores and of sexual passivity are only separable in words. Sexual
creativity and creativity in labour are both areas where human need demands
we give free scope to our “interplaying natural and acquired activities”.* For
women (and therefore men) natural and acquired powers are repressed
simultaneously. The passive sexual receptivity of women creates the
compulsively tidy housewife and can make a monotonous assembly line
therapeutic. The trivia of most of housework and the discipline’ which is
required to perform the same work over every day, every week, every year,
double on holidays, destroys the possibilities of uninhibited sexuality. Our
childhood is a preparation for martyrdom: we are taught to derive happiness
from clean sex on whiter than white sheets; to sacrifice sexuality and other
creative activity at one and the same time.
[*Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Okonomie, Band 1, Berlin, Dietz
Verlag, 1962, p. 512. “Large-scale industry makes it a question of life and death to
16
Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
replace that monstrosity which is a miserable available working population, kept in
reserve for the changing needs of exploitation by capital, to replace this with the
absolute availability of the individual for changing requisites of work; to replace the
partial individual, a mere bearer of a social detail function, with the fully developed
individual for whom varied social functions are modes of interplaying natural and
acquired activities.”]
So far the women’s movement, most notably by destroying the myth of the
vaginal orgasm, has exposed the physical mechanism which allowed women’s
sexual potential to be strictly defined and limited by men. Now we can begin to
reintegrate sexuality with other aspects of creativity, to see how sexuality will
always be constrained unless the work we do does not mutilate us and our
individual capacities, and unless the persons with whom we have sexual
relations are not our masters and are not also mutilated by their work. To
explode the vaginal myth is to demand female autonomy as opposed to
subordination and sublimation. But it is not only the clitoris versus the vagina.
It is both versus the uterus. Either the vagina is primarily the passage to the
reproduction of labour power sold as a commodity, the capitalist function of
the uterus, or it is part of our natural powers, our social equipment. Sexuality
after all is the most social of expressions, the deepest human communication. It
is in that sense the dissolution of autonomy. The working class organizes as a
class to transcend itself as a class; within that class we organize autonomously
to create the basis to transcend autonomy.
The "political" attack against women
But while we are finding our way of being and of organizing ourselves in
struggle, we discover we are confronted by those who are only too eager to
attack women, even as we form a movement. In defending herself against
obliteration, through work and through consumption, they say, the woman is
responsible for the lack of unity of the class. Let us make a partial list of the
sins of which she stands accused. They say:
1. She wants more of her husband's wage to buy for example clothes for herself
and her children, not based on what he thinks she needs but on what she thinks
she and her children should have. He works hard for the money. She only
demands another kind of distribution of their lack of wealth, rather than
assisting his struggle for more wealth, more wages.
2. She is in rivalry with other women to be more attractive than they, to have
more things than they do, and to have a cleaner and tidier house than her
neighbors'. She doesn't ally with them as she should on a class basis.
3. She buries herself in her home and refuses to understand the struggle of her
husband on the production line. She may even complain when he goes out on
strike rather than backing him up. She votes Conservative.
These are some of the reasons given by those who consider her reactionary or
at best backward, even by men who take leading roles in factory struggles and
who seem most able to understand the nature of the social boss because of their
militant action. It comes easy to them to condemn women for what they
consider to be backwardness because that is the prevailing ideology of the
society. They do not add that they have benefited from women's subordinate
position by being waited on hand and foot from the moment of their birth.
Some do not even know that they have been waited on, so natural is it to them
for mothers and sisters and daughters to serve "their" men. It is very difficult
for us, on the other hand, to separate inbred male supremacy from men's attack,
17
Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
which appears to be strictly "political", launched only for the benefit of the
class.
Let us look at the matter more closely.
1. Women as consumers
Women do not make the home the center of consumption. The process of
consumption is integral to the production of labor power, and if women refused
to do the shopping (that is, to spend), this would be strike action. Having said
that, however, we must add that those social relationships which women are
denied because they are cut off from socially organized labor, they often try to
compensate for by buying things. Whether it is adjudged trivial depends on the
viewpoint and sex of the judge. Intellectuals buy books, but no one calls this
consumption trivial. Independent of the validity of the contents, the book in
this society still represents, through a tradition older than capitalism, a male
value.
We have already said that women buy things for their home because that home
is the only proof that they exist. But the idea that frugal consumption is in any
way a liberation is as old as capitalism, and comes from the capitalists who
always blame the worker's situation on the worker. For years Harlem was told
by head-shaking liberals that if Black men would only stop driving Cadillacs
(until the finance company took them back), the problem of color would be
solved. Until the violence of the struggle-the only fitting reply-provided a
measure of social power, that Cadillac was one of the few ways to display the
potential for power. This and not "practical economics" caused the liberals
pain.
In any case, nothing any of us buys would we need if we were free. Not the
food they poison for us, nor the clothes that identify us by class, sex and
generation, nor the houses in which they imprison us.
In any case, too, our problem is that we never have enough, not that we have
too much. And that pressure which women place on men is a defense of the
wage, not an attack. Precisely because women are the slaves of wage slaves,
men divide the wage between themselves and the general family expense. If
women did not make demands, the general family standard of living could drop
to absorb the inflation-the woman of course is the first to do without. Thus
unless the woman makes demands, the family is functional to capital in an
additional sense to the ones we have listed: it can absorb the fall in the price of
labor power.* This, therefore, is the most ongoing material way in which
women can defend the living standards of the class. And when they go out to
political meetings, they will need even more money!
[*”But the other, more fundamental, objection, which we shall develop in the ensuing
chapters, flows from our disputing the assumption that the general level of real wages is
directly determined by the character of the wage bargain . . . We shall endeavor to show
that primarily it is certain other forces which determine the general level of real wages .
. . We shall argue that there has been a fundamental misunderstanding of how in this
respect the economy in which we live actually works." (Emphasis added.) The General
Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes, N.Y., Harcourt,
Brace and World, 1964, p.13. "Certain other forces", in our view, are first of all
women.]
2. Women as rivals
As for women's "rivalry", Frantz Fanon has clarified for the Third World what
18
Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
only racism prevents from being generally applied to the class. The colonized,
he says, when they do not organize against their oppressors, attack each other.
The woman's pressure for greater consumption may at times express itself in
the form of rivalry, but nevertheless as we have said protects the living
standards of the class. Which is unlike women's sexual rivalry; that rivalry is
rooted in their economic and social dependence on men. To the degree that
they live for men, dress for men, work for men, they are manipulated by men
through this rivalry.*
[*It has been noticed that many of the Bolsheviks after 1917 found female partners
among the dispossessed aristocracy. When power continues to reside in men both at the
level of the State and in individual relations, women continue to be "the spoil and
handmaid of communal lust" (Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1959, p.94). The breed of "the new tsars" goes
back a long way.
Already in 1921 from "Decisions of the Third Congress of the Communist
International", one can read in Part I of "Work Among Women": "The Third Congress
of the Comintern confirms the basic proposition of revolutionary Marxism, that is, that
there is no `specific woman question' and no `specific women's movement', and that
every sort of alliance of working women with bourgeois feminism, as well as any
support by the women workers of the treacherous tactics of the social compromisers
and opportunists, leads to the undermining of the forces of the proletariat . . . In order to
put an end to women's slavery it is necessary to inaugurate the new Communist
organization of society."
The theory being male, the practice was to "neutralize". Let us quote from one of
the founding fathers. At the first National Conference of Communist Women of the
Communist Party of Italy on March 26,1922, "Comrade Gramsci pointed out that
special action must be organized among housewives, who constitute the large majority
of the proletarian women. He said that they should be related in some way to our
movement by our setting up special organizations. Housewives, as far as the quality of
their work is concerned, can be considered similar to the artisans and therefore they will
hardly be communists; however, because they are the workers' mates, and because they
share in some way the workers' life, they are attracted toward communism. Our
propaganda can therefore have an influence over [sic] these housewives; it can be
instrumental, if not to officer them into our organization, to neutralize them; so that they
do not stand in the way of the possible struggles by the workers." (From Compagna, the
Italian Communist Party organ for work among women, Year I, No.3 (April 2, 1922] ,
p.2.)]
As for rivalry about their homes, women are trained from birth to be obsessive
and possessive about clean and tidy homes. But men cannot have it both ways;
they cannot continue to enjoy the privilege of having a private servant and then
complain about the effects of privatization. If they continue to complain, we
must conclude that their attack on us for rivalry is really an apology for our
servitude. If Fanon was not right, that the strife among the colonized is an
expression of their low level of organization, then the antagonism is a sign of
natural incapacity. When we call a home a ghetto, we could call it a colony
governed by indirect rule and be as accurate. The resolution of the antagonism
of the colonized to each other lies in autonomous struggle. Women have
overcome greater obstacles than rivalry to unite in supporting men in struggles.
Where women have been less successful is in transforming and deepening
moments of struggle by making of them opportunities to raise their own
demands. Autonomous struggle turns the question on its head: not "will women
unite to support men", but "will men unite to support women".
3. Women as divisive
What has prevented previous political intervention by women? Why can they
be used in certain circumstances against strikes? Why, in other words, is the
class not united? From the beginning of this document we have made central
the exclusion of women from socialized production. That is an objective
character of capitalist organization: co-operative labor in the factory and office,
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Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
isolated labor in the home. This is mirrored subjectively by the way workers in
industry organize separately from the community. What is the community to
do? What are women to do? Support, be appendages to men in the home and in
the struggle, even form a women's auxiliary to unions. This division and this
kind of division is the history of the class. At every stage of the struggle the
most peripheral to the productive cycle are used against those at the center, so
long as the latter ignore the former. This is the history of trade unions, for
example, in the United States, when Black workers were used as strikebreakers
never, by the way, as often as white workers were led to believe Blacks like
women are immediately identifiable and reports of strikebreaking reinforce
prejudices which arise from objective divisions: the white on the assembly line,
the Black sweeping round his feet; or the man on the assembly line, the woman
sweeping round his feet when he gets home.
Men when they reject work consider themselves militant, and when we reject
our work, these same men consider us nagging wives. When some of us vote
Conservative because we have been excluded from political struggle, they
think we are backward, while they have voted for parties which didn't even
consider that we existed as anything but ballast, and in the process sold them
(and us all) down the river.
C. The Productivity of Discipline
The third aspect of women's role in the family is that, because of the special
brand of stunting of the personality already discussed, the woman becomes a
repressive figure, disciplinarian of all the members of the family, ideologically
and psychologically. She may live under the tyranny of her husband, of her
home, the tyranny of striving to be "heroic mother and happy wife" when her
whole existence repudiates this ideal. Those who are tyrannized and lack
power are with the new generation for the first years of their lives producing
docile workers and little tyrants, in the same way the teacher does at school. (In
this the woman is joined by her husband: not by chance do parent teacher
associations exist.) Women, responsible for the reproduction of labor power,
on the one hand discipline the children who will be workers tomorrow and on
the other hand discipline the husband to work today, for only his wage can pay
for labor power to be reproduced.
Here we have only attempted to consider female domestic productivity
without going into detail about the psychological implications. At least we
have located and essentially outlined this female domestic productivity as it
passes through the complexities of the role that the woman plays (in addition,
that is, to the actual domestic work the burden of which she assumes without
pay). We pose, then, as foremost the need to break this role that wants women
divided from each other, from men and from children, each locked in her
family as the chrysalis in the cocoon that imprisons itself by its own work, to
die and leave silk for capital. To reject all this, as we have already said, means
for housewives to recognize themselves also as a section of the class, the most
degraded because they are not paid a wage.
The housewife's position in the overall struggle of women is crucial, since it
undermines the very pillar supporting the capitalist organization of work,
namely the family.
So every goal that tends to affirm the individuality of women against this
figure complementary to everything and everybody, that is, the housewife, is
worth posing as a goal subversive to the continuation, the productivity of this
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Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
role.
In this same sense all the demands that can serve to restore to the woman
the integrity of her basic physical functions, starting with the sexual one which
was the first to be robbed along with productive creativity, have to be posed
with the greatest urgency.
It is not by chance that research in birth control has developed so slowly,
that abortion is forbidden almost the world over or conceded finally only for
"therapeutic" reasons.
To move first on these demands is not facile reformism. Capitalist
management of these matters poses over and over discrimination of class and
discrimination of women specifically.
Why were proletarian women, Third World women, used as guinea pigs in this
research? Why does the question of birth control continue to be posed as
women's problem? To begin to struggle to overthrow the capitalist
management over these matters is to move on a class basis, and on a
specifically female basis. To link these struggles with the struggle against
motherhood conceived as the responsibility of women exclusively, against
domestic work conceived as women's work, ultimately against the models that
capitalism offers us as examples of women's emancipation which are nothing
more than ugly copies of the male role, is to struggle against the division and
organization of labor.
Women and the struggle not to work
Let us sum up. The role of housewife, behind whose isolation is hidden social
labour, must be destroyed. But our alternatives are strictly defined. Up to now,
the myth of female incapacity, rooted in this isolated woman dependent on
someone else’s wage and therefore shaped by someone else’s consciousness,
has been broken by only one action: the woman getting her own wage,
breaking the back of personal economic dependence, making her own
independent experience with the world outside the home, performing social
labour in a socialized structure, whether the factory or the office, and initiating
there her own forms of social rebellion along with the traditional forms of the
class. The advent of the women’s movement is a rejection of this alternative.
Capital itself is seizing upon the same impetus which created a movement-the
rejection by millions of women of women’s traditional place-to recompose the
work force with increasing numbers of women. The movement can only
develop in opposition to this. It poses by its very existence and must pose with
increasing articulation in action that women refuse the myth of liberation
through work.
For we have worked enough. We have chopped billions of tons of cotton,
washed billions of dishes, scrubbed billions of floors, typed billions of words,
wired billions of radio sets, washed billions of nappies, by hand and in
machines. Every time they have “let us in” to some traditionally male enclave,
it was to find for us a new level of exploitation. Here again we must make a
parallel, different as they are, between underdevelopment in the Third World
and underdevelopment in the metropolis-to be more precise, in the kitchens of
the metropolis. Capitalist planning proposes to the Third World that it
“develop”; that in addition to its present agonies, it too suffer the agony of an
industrial counter-revolution. Women in the metropolis have been offered the
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Dalla Costa, “Women and the Subversion of the Community”
same “aid”. But those of us who have gone out of our homes to work because
we had to or for extras or for economic independence have warned the rest:
inflation has riveted us to this bloody typing-pool or to this assembly-line, and
in that there is no salvation. We must refuse the development they are offering
us. But the struggle of the working woman is not to return to the isolation of
the home, appealing as this sometimes may be on Monday morning; any more
than the housewife’s struggle is to exchange being imprisoned in a house for
being clinched to desks or machines, appealing as this sometimes may be
compared to the loneliness of the twelfth-storey flat.
Women must completely discover their own possibilities-which are neither
mending socks nor becoming captains of ocean-going ships. Better still, we
may wish to do these things, but these now cannot be located anywhere but in
the history of capital.
The challenge to the women’s movement is to find modes of struggle which,
while they liberate women from the home, at the same time avoid on the one
hand a double slavery and on the other prevent another degree of capitalistic
control and regimentation. This ultimately is the dividing line between
reformism and revolutionary politics within the women’s movement.
It seems that there have been few women of genius. There could not be since,
cut off from the social process, we cannot see on what matters they could
exercise their genius. Now there is a matter, the struggle itself.
Freud said also that every woman from birth suffers from penis envy. He
forgot to add that this feeling of envy begins from the moment when she
perceives that in some way to have a penis means to have power. Even less did
he realize that the traditional power of the penis commenced upon a whole new
history at the very moment when the separation of man from woman became a
capitalistic division.
And this is where our struggle begins.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa
29 December 1971
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